CEDAR HILLS, Utah County — Lifelong Utah resident Gwen Richards has seen her July 24 birthday celebrated with a booming cannon, dancing, parades and fireworks, but this year will be the biggest celebration of them all.

On Saturday, Richards turns 100.

"It just happened," Richards said of living for so long. "I didn't plan it."

Richards' life has spanned one of the most turbulent hundred years in history. But she weathered the decades gracefully, changing from the vibrant young woman immortalized in the pendant she wears around her neck to an elegant, snowy-haired matriarch with a knowing smile and firm handshake.

And all along the way, she has learned and taught.

Born in Scipio in 1910, when most people still used a horse and buggy, Richards was raised in a house with no central heating, running water or electricity.

She remembers gathering with her family around a dark light bulb that hung from the ceiling on the day electricity came to Scipio.

"My dad got a little nervous and said, 'Maybe we ought to stand back,' " Richards said, sitting in her tidy apartment at The Charleston at Cedar Hills. "When that hour came, nothing happened, but we had electricity for the first time in our lives."

Richards attended grade school in Scipio and high school in Fillmore. In a time when women rarely received anything more than a high school education, Richards and her mother persuaded her father to let her attend Snow College.

"I knew it was hard for them to let me go, because times were hard," she said.

But one day her father approached her and handed her a checkbook for her to use while she was at school.

"It was a life-changing event," she said.

Richards went on to earn an associate degree in elementary education and became a schoolteacher in Heber City, where she began fulfilling a dream she'd had since her earliest years — teaching children.

"It was a thrill for me to teach them and see them learn," she said.

It was her teaching career that introduced her to Fred "Frosty" Richards, a Wasatch High School teacher and coach who soon invited her on a drive up a nearby canyon.

"He charmed me with his singing and his legend of Timpanogos," Richards said. "Everybody loved him, so how could I resist?"

The two were married in 1930, not long after the stock market crashed. During the grueling years of the Great Depression, Gwen and Fred Richards raised four children.

"It wasn't easy," she said, "but we survived."

After the Depression came the war. Though she had to give up teaching when she wed because married women then were not allowed to teach school, Richards soon returned to the classroom with many other former teachers across the country to replace the men who had joined the military.

"If you could teach school, it was your patriotic duty to fill in," she said. "After the war, they couldn't very well go back to the old law."

Richards went on to teach for 32 years, often staying after school to offer students extra help. Her wisdom has also been felt in her family, which includes six children, 29 grandchildren, 51 great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.

"She's influenced a lot of lives," said daughter Anne Bowen. "It's really remarkable, the span of influence she's had."

Some of Richards' students still come to visit her, decades after taking her class.

Eventually, a change in the law that required teachers to have a four-year degree took Richards back to the classroom as a student, this time at BYU. There, she achieved another goal by getting her bachelor's degree.

"My dream had come true," Richards said.

More than nine decades after first setting foot in the schoolhouse in Scipio, Richards is still learning. She reads the newspaper daily, staying up-to-date on current events, and keeps her mind sharp by memorizing hymns and scriptures, all 50 states and poetry. In her later years, she has taught herself to play piano and the organ, which she played until she was 97.

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"She still goes out about three times a week," said Rosemary Lind, another daughter. "She's in great health. If you're going to be 100, this is the way to do it."

At 100 years old, Richards is still teaching, too.

"Be positive," she tells her posterity. "Try hard to be an influence for good."

e-mail: jritter@desnews.com

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